Huge Portion of my Hard drive space is unnacounted for

In attempting to clear some space off my hard drive I've encountered something odd.

when I get info on my hard drive, it states I have approx. 27Gigs left available.

as I expand further into users, it says that it is possessing approx. 176 Gigs of data.

however, when I expand even further into the user file and take a look at everything that's in there, it only accounts for about 54Gigs.

which means that there's 122 Gigs unaccounted for somewhere on my hard drive but i cant locate it!

anyone have any ideas?

That's a not a good way of determining where your space is going. Download Disk Inventory X and run it on your HD. Once it finishes, you will get a nice hierarchy of which folders take up the most space along with colorful blobs representing the files. Look at the biggest block and go from there..

You can now expand the tree to really see where the space is going and who is taking it. Once you find the culprits, assuming you don't need those files anymore, you can delete them and make sure to empty the trashcan..

You didn't tell us what Mac you have. I see it's a laptop. Laptops can save Time Machine "snapshots" that take up space until you connect the external backup drive. Is this a possibility?

https://support.apple.com/kb/PH25723?locale=en_US